About
Michael Harrison
1958–2026
Michael Harrison (1958–2026) was a composer and pianist whose richly resonant, spiritually inclined music drew on his deep study of North Indian raga and the ancient principles of just intonation. He invented the harmonic piano — a grand piano whose retooled pedal could shift between two tuning configurations, opening twenty-four notes per octave — and wrote long-form works in which the slow unfolding of pure harmonic ratios produced what he called “luminous tone clouds and tidal waves of resonance.”
Early Years
Michael Kent Harrison was born on October 24, 1958, in Bryn Mawr, Pennsylvania, to David Harrison, a mathematician, and Ann (Hill) Harrison. The family moved to Eugene when his father joined the faculty at the University of Oregon, and Michael took up the piano as a child. Summers were often spent in Chatham and Concord, Massachusetts, with his grandfather, George R. Harrison, a professor of experimental physics at MIT and Dean of Science there from 1942 to 1964 — an early influence on his lifelong intuition that music and the natural sciences are not far apart.
He attended Phillips Academy in Andover, Massachusetts. At fifteen, drawn to mountain climbing, he took a transformational backpacking trip in Nepal. He began practicing transcendental meditation, and the Sufi mystic Hazrat Inayat Khan became a lifelong companion in his thinking. A favorite line of Khan's: “The joy of life depends upon the perfect tune of mind and soul.”
Teachers and Apprenticeship
Introduction to Indian Music and Just Intonation
A world music course at the University of Oregon led Harrison, a freshman in 1976, to begin singing Indian devotional music and acquire his first tamboura. Within a year, he began a formal study of Indian raga with Shabda Khan, who was a disciple of the Indian vocal master, Pandit Pran Nath. Ultimately, Harrison became a direct disciple of Pran Nath, making numerous trips to India with mentor, Terry Riley, to study raga. Harrison States, frequently hosting his teacher at his home in New York or visiting him on the West Coast, where Pran Nath was on faculty at Mills College in Oakland, California.
Harrison remained a dedicated student of Pran Nath until his teacher’s death in 1996.He continued studying raga through a mentorship with composer Terry Riley, performing and making frequent trips to India with Riley. From 1999, Harrison commenced studying with Ustad Mashkoor Ali Khan, a master of the Kirana aural tradition of singing, advanced by Khan’s grandfather, Abdul Karim Kahn, and taught to Harrison by Pran Nath.
A steady practice of singing Indian ragas with the tamboura during the late 1970’s led Harrison to hear his main instrument, the piano, as chronically out of tune. His attempts to bring his piano back in tune led to his revelation that Indian music adheres to a different tuning system than that used for the western piano. He acquired a second piano and tuned it using the just intonation tuning he discovered in the Harvard Dictionary of Music, but still found that unsatisfactory.
In-Depth Study of Just Intonation
In 1979, a teaching engagement at the Omega Institute in New York led to Harrison’s first meeting with the minimalist composer, La Monte Young who was a disciple of, Pandit Pran Nath. It was there that Harrison took his first lessons with the two luminaries and began his long-term relationship and studies with both.
Harrison’s desire to learn from Young lead to extended trips from his home in Oregon, to Tribeca in Manhattan, where he lived and worked closely with Young and his wife, artist Marian Zazeela, who frequently hosted Pran Nath while Harrison was living there. Harrison studied Young’s masterpiece, The Well Tuned Piano, hearing for the first time, the types of harmonic relationships that could be achieved by a piano tuned in just intonation. By, the early 1980’s Young was in need of a new tuner to tune his piano in just intonation, and after auditioning Harrison using various sections of The Well Tuned Piano, Young chose Harrison as his tuner. Harrison lived and worked in Young’s loft from 1979-1987, serving as the piano tuner for The Well-Tuned Piano. He sat with Young at the piano whenever he composed, recorded, played or performed concerts, working through roughly fifty performances of the piece. This long-term apprenticeship mimicked the way Harrison learned Indian ragas from Pran Nath and the immersion reshaped his ear. Harrison ultimately became the only other pianist Young ever permitted to play The Well-Tuned Piano.
EXCERPT FROM NEW MUSIC BOX INTERVIEW WITH LA MONTE YOUNG:
“Disciples were highly prized if they were good at memorizing. It was part of the whole process. You raised the question. What about The Well-Tuned Piano; who's going to play it? First I want to say that Michael Harrison did play it very well when he played a private concert that we presented. I was myself impressed at how well he could learn it. I didn't ever have him practice it for me until just shortly before the concert. He just learned the piece by helping me tune and sitting beside me during performances. And that's very much the way I learned from my guru. Of course, there were some sit down lessons with my guru where he'd give me this and give me that. Just as I would say to Michael, write down this theme and Michael would write it down. That way I got a few themes transcribed.”
Exploring Just Intonation and the Harmonic Piano
Searching for an explanation for why his piano started sounding out of tune, Harrison began exploring Just Intonation, a tuning system with roots reaching back to Pythagoras, in which the intervals between notes are built from whole-number ratios. Western music had largely abandoned these pure ratios in favor of equal temperament, which permits free modulation at the cost of slightly mistuning every interval. In ragas — and in older traditions worldwide — the pure ratios persisted. Harrison came to believe that just intonation was a more faithful path, one that corresponded to his emerging spiritual sense of music.
“Just intonation is the optimal resonance,” he said in an oral history interview. “It's finding those musical harmonies that create the most resonant fields. We experience that not only through our ears musically, but through our whole nervous system, our psyche. It calms us down. It feels like an attunement — a deep attunement.” He conceived an instrument of his own — the harmonic piano — a grand piano with a pedal capable of shifting between two tuning configurations, making twenty-four notes per octave available in performance. The critic Kyle Gann hailed it as “an indisputable landmark in the history of Western tuning,” and it is documented in the Grove Dictionary of Musical Instruments. Harrison's first long-form work for the instrument, From Ancient Worlds, appeared in 1992. His most celebrated work, Revelation — a structured improvisation built from reverberant overtones — was first performed in 2001. The Pulitzer Prize–winning critic Tim Page called it “the most brilliant and original extended composition for solo piano since the early works of Frederic Rzewski,” and the recording was named one of the best classical albums of 2007 by The New York Times and the Boston Globe. Composer and friend Terry Riley has called Revelation his magnum opus.
Harrison also developed a structural method he called Integrated Proportionality, in which the proportions of the harmonic relationships in a work organically determine its pitch, duration, and dynamics.
Other Notable Works
Just Ancient Loops (2012), on the album, Time Loops, a propulsive composition for the cellist Maya Beiser, was followed by Just Constellations (first performed 2015, recorded 2020), an uncanny exploration of harmonies from The Well-Tuned Piano commissioned by the vocal ensemble Roomful of Teeth and once performed at The Tank Center for Sonic Arts in Colorado. The highly acclaimed piece was described as ""glacially beautiful," by music critic, Alex Ross, in The New Yorker. Seven Sacred Names (Cantaloupe, 2021), a hypnotic meditation on Sufi mysticism featuring multiple artists, including Roomful of Teeth, the violinist Tim Fain, the cellist Ashley Bathgate, and Harrison himself at the piano, was called “music of positively intoxicating beauty” by Steve Smith in The New Yorker.
Harrison's music has been performed at venues around the world, including, Carnegie Hall, Lincoln Center, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, MoMA, BAM Next Wave Festival, the Louvre, Centre Pompidou, the Park Avenue Armory, MASS MoCA, Spoleto Festival USA, Big Ears Festival, Klavier Festival Ruhr, Ojai Music Festival, the Sundance Film Festival, the Venice Biennale, the Turchin Center for the Visual Arts, the Museum of European and Mediterranean Civilization in Marseilles and and the Princeton Institute for Advanced Study, among many others.
Notable Multi Media Collaborations
Harrison became identified for his collaborations with artists in other media starting in 1990, when his music was used for the trailers of the feature film, Awakenings.
In 2011, he collaborated with visual artist, Loris Gréaud, on the Bragdon Pavillion for the exhibit, Paris, Dehli, Bombay at the Centre Pompidou in Paris, France. Music from Harrison's long form just intonation piece, From Ancient Worlds, pulsated in rhythm with animated mandalas based on the geometric theories of architect Claude Bragdon, projected against a black screen.
In 2012, Harrison's multi-track cello piece, Just ancient Loops, was the inspiration for the short film of the same name by award-winning film maker, Bill Morrison. The film is often shown as a backdrop to the live performance of the piece by cellist, Maya beiser, for whom it was created.
In 2023, Harrison conceived of Passage with visual artist Nina Elder. Passage is an interactive immersive installation representing the passage of one day of celestial and human time. Music in Harrison's just intonation tuning, based on ragas corresponding to different times of day, and lighting created by Elder, are impacted by visitors passing through the space, affecting the sound waves and casting shadows.
Harrison collaborated on an immersive installation with the Turner Award-winning artist, Laure Prouvost for the exhibition, ‘Au fort, les âmes sont' (In the fort, souls are), presented at The Museum of European and Mediterranean Civilizations in Marseille, France in 2025. The sensory exhibit, a commentary against the rush for development and its devastating effects on the natural world. Harrison ambient music enhances the dream-like imagery of Prouvost's visuals.
Awards and Residencies
Harrison was a recipient of the Guggenheim Fellowship and the NYFA Artist Fellowship. Other awards included an Aaron Copland Recording Grant, the Classical Recording Foundation Award, the IBLA Foundation Prize, an American Composers Forum residency, and a New Music USA Grant. His residencies included MacDowell, Yaddo, Camargo, the American Academy in Rome, MASS MoCA, Bogliasco, Millay, Djerassi, Marble House, Ucross, La Napoule, I-Park, and the McColl Center.
Teaching
Harrison was a generous and beloved teacher who was co-founder and president of the American Academy of Indian Classical Music (AAICM), and led an intimate, long-running program of raga study for a group of devoted students. He created and directed the Creative Music Intensive at Arts, Letters & Numbers, an organization combining interdisciplinary programs, artist residencies and public events. Harrison also taught in the composition department at the Manhattan School of Music and a led "Harmonic Self," a monthly 2-hour online class through Peace Theological Seminary College of Philosophy. Fellow composer and friend, Terry Riley noted that Harrison was “an extremely kind and generous man openly sharing his gifts and knowledge with fellow musicians.”
Later Years
In the 2010s, Harrison began fusing his two principal areas of practice by adapting ragas for piano, leading to the creation of hybrid works, including, Janpouri for pianist, Kimball Gallagher and maestro vocalist, Ustad Mashkoor Ali Kahn, and, India Blue hilighting an intricate piano part that he performed with sitar virtuoso, Shakir Kahn and tabla master, Anirban Roy Chowdhury. Harrison later joined with composer/sound artists, Christina Vantzou and John Also Bennet to create the trio's self-titled album. Drawing on Harrison's expertise in Indian raga and Just Intonation, Bennett's creative use of synths and Vantzou's ability to precisely introduce field recordings and tape loops between the notes produced by her colleagues, the album represents a significant step in Harrison's reimagining of ragas that would culminate in the achievement of his years-long goal, the Raga Cycle Project.
The Raga Cycle Project is a body of work across multiple albums combining traditional and original ragas eventually spanning twenty-four hours. Cantaloupe Music released the first album, Evening Light, a collaboration with the vocalist Ina Filip. Music from this album was also presented in an installation, 24 Hours @ Once, with the filmmaker Bill Morrison.
Additional tracks recorded by Harrison will be released alongside those of an international roster of artists Harrison intended to participate in the completion of the remaining albums of the Raga Cycle Project.